Book Review 2019-009
The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders by B.J. Hollars
2018 by University of Alabama Press, 155 pages
(We purchased a copy of this book after having received a galley of it--and quick note--I've known and generally considered Hollars a friend for a decade now, including having published a mini-eBook of his essays).
We read this one in galley form and felt it was too early to review the book. We just re-read it this past weekend and were reminded of just what an excellent great book it is, and what an excellent, and brave, writer Hollars is. This can be looked at as his third Civil Rights book after Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America, and Opening the Doors: The Desegregation of the University of Alabama and the Fight for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa. He's also published books on birds, on monsters, short fiction and a masterful work of non-fiction we'll get to shortly. But we believe it will be this trio, and any forthcoming titles he pens on this aspect of America that will be his calling card for years to come.
In the summer of 1961, groups of both black and white men and women boarded buses. They were testing a pair of Supreme Court rulings by integrating the buses, and doing so on interstate travel through the deep south. They referred to themselves as the Freedom Riders and they willingly knew they were going into this venture where prison might be their best possible result.
Some 50 years later, Hollars, an associate professor, took part in a pretty immersive bus trip with a 100 or so students spent a couple of weeks through the deep south learning as much about the Civil Rights Movement as possible. It wasn't enough for Hollars and he began planning a second trip. He realized that some of the Freedom Riders were still alive, and plotted out a course and began contacting, and sometimes re-contacting numerous times, those that he hoped to meet up with and interview. Perhaps it was the previous two books, maybe it was the persistence, and possibly it had something to do with Hollars being a pretty damn nice guy. In the end, he ended up interviewing nine of the Freedom Riders.
It began with Jim Zwerg, a white man that went from Wisconsin on down to Nashville where he really began to realize his beliefs in regard to Civil Rights. During at least a portion of the ride he was a seat mate to John Lewis. As they pulled into the Montgomery Bus Station, they noticed the last patrol car in view taking off. They were attacked, with Zwerg taking a huge beating and being admitted to a hospital. His picture was on the front page of papers all over the country, showing a white man attacking a man of his own color--it caused people to think a bit harder on the subject. What is different in this telling of the story than in many other versions is that Hollars gets Zwerg to talk about what he was thinking at the time, as well as the time after it. He also gets him to open up about one of the aspects of being a Freedom Rider that hasn't been detailed--the mental anguish many went through over their previous relationships, especially those with their parents. He was not allowed back home and it crushed him that the people that raised him to care for others, to see all men as equal, did not do so themselves and did not do so to the level of disowning him.
Some, such as Miriam Feingold, a 20 year old woman from Brooklyn, NY, ended up in jail at Parchman Farms, a horrible prison in Mississippi, for a 40 day stint. In her mug shot she is smiling. She gave Hollars three reasons for this, and the third is the most compelling:
Smiling fit with my way of digging the thing back into them. There was no way that I was going to show them that I was anything other than a soldier for justice. I was not a victim, I was not a criminal, I was not scared of them. I was proud of what I'd done. I wasn't going to let them deny me that."
There was Charles Person, now a 73 year old man who, speaking to college aged students, telling them:
When you get up in the morning and brush your teeth and your hair, look in the mirror and say "I can change the world." When you do this enough you'll believe it.
One things that is consistent from Freedom Rider to the next--this idea of a collective. Rarely does something say I did such and such, it's almost always We.
Another title Hollars penned is Dispatches from the Drownings: Reporting the Fiction of Non-Fiction. In this book, Hollars put together 100 articles, with 75 of them using old newspaper articles as sources. The articles were in regard to a river along the edge of town and the many deaths suffered at its hand. The other 25 were completely made up by Hollars. Even in the articles using the newspaper, one comes to realize that the articles are based on witnesses and their memory of what they saw, or didn't see. Or from hearsay--those that talked to witnesses now talking to reporters. It is a fantastic examination of non-fiction, and memory, and sourcing. At least that's how we remember it--we read that book a few years ago.
We noted in the introduction that we found Hollars to be a brave writer. The reason we believe that is that to write about these topics as he has, and do so thoroughly and taking everything into consideration, one must delve into the materials available. To spend months or more deep into some of the worst things that have happened in this country, to be witness, even years later, to the horrors of lynching, or actions from the KKK, and so much more. Doing this and realizing how little has truly changed, and to do so while raising a couple of young children, and to continue to do so book after book, knowing the toll it took on your mental health the previous time, or times, seems to us a difficult thing to do. And we realize we state this as a white male, with ZERO idea of being in the shoes of those Hollars writes of. And also that he does so as a white male. When asked about this in an interview he replied: "As a white person, you can use your privilege as a shield to hide behind or as a sword to fight injustice. The more I learn about these events, the more I recognize the privileges I hold and the more I want to be vocal about it."
And write about it he has, multiple times. In this effort, actually with the capability of speaking directly with many of those that he was writing about. Getting not just the basic history that we've seen in many other books about the Freedom Riders, but getting their own memories and reflections. Getting a deeper version of this important history than had previously been published.
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